U.S. Rep. John Joyce, R-13th District, at the U.S. Southern border earlier this month (Facebook photo)

Pennsylvania U.S. Rep. John Joyce’s office made a big deal of his recent inspection tour of the southern border, plugging it on Twitter and blasting out press releases about the trip.

But the 13th District Republican has since had to correct claims made to both the Associated Press and the Tribune-Review last week that there were cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis among the migrants who were picked up by border agents in Yuma County, Ariz.

Joyce’s spokesman, Andrew Romeo, told the Capital-Star Wednesday that the congressman had based his claim on information provided to him by former Arizona GOP state chairman Jonathan Lines, who was the delegation’s guide during its trip to Yuma.

Joyce “did not expect to be given bad information by someone in that position, and always wants to be accurate, which is why he was incredibly disappointed to learn there was a problem with Mr. Lines’ information and immediately removed the video of Mr. Lines discussing tuberculosis at the border from his congressional Facebook page,” Romeo said, referring to a since-deleted April 16 video featuring a conversation between Joyce and Lines.

Joyce told the Associated Press and other home state journalists during a conference call that some of the tuberculosis cases were a drug-resistant strain, and that his “concern is what about the person who wasn’t coughing and wasn’t recognized as having tuberculosis, and they didn’t come here for treatment for their disease. They could be released in a day and a half and be sitting at a restaurant [table “” not found /]
beside you.” according to the the Phoenix New Times.

But as the New Times also reports, the Yuma office of the U.S. Border Patrol had “no record of any in-custody migrant carrying a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis for at least seven years, according to spokesperson Justin Kallinger, adding that the relevant data only goes back to 2012.”

At the southern border this week I learned how a wall will assist Border Patrol agents in their efforts stem the tide of the crisis we are currently facing. Watch my interview with @WJACTV about my trip to Yuma, Arizona. pic.twitter.com/OZlrAw6D6O

“We are mandated by the county to contact them on diseases like drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis,” Kallinger told the New Times. In addition, Yuma County spokesperson Kevin Tunell confirmed to the newspaper “that the county received no such notice from border authorities.”

It’s tempting to believe the claim by Joyce and his handlers that the freshman was simply passing along information from someone he believed to be credible.

That is, until your remember that Republicans have spent the last two-plus years spreading this kind of bigoted nonsense as a way to terrify their base into supporting some pretty hateful and xenophobic policies.

To review, then-candidate Donald Trump kicked off his campaign for the presidency in 2015 by alleging that undocumented immigrants at the southern border were rapists.

In reality, this policy, if eventually implemented, would do nothing to reduce public housing waiting lists that now run to the multiple hundreds of thousands of people. But it would effectively render thousands of native-born children homeless.

So it has that going for it.

More on my trip to the southern border and the legislation I am cosponsoring to fix the loopholes in our immigration system -> https://t.co/0h1Q47NYxY

It’s also important to remember that Joyce is a Trump loyalist, one who dutifully parroted the White House’s line that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had found “No collusion. No obstruction,” adding that “The case is closed. It’s time to move on.”

During his 2018 campaign for the U.S. House, Joyce echoed the administration’s hard line on denying federal funding to “sanctuary cities,” an undefined term that’s commonly applied to municipalities that don’t comply with civil detainer requests from federal immigration authorities.

So we’ll take Joyce at his word that he was acting in good faith on the information handed to him by a local government official in Arizona. On the other hand, he also had to have some inkling of the impact that his statements would have among his largely rural and Republican constituency.

Joyce’s statements are an unfortunate reminder that Republicans have turned undocumented immigrants into a faceless other to be feared.

And they can’t complain when we take them on their word on that either.

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An award-winning political journalist with more than 25 years' experience in the news business, John L. Micek is The Pennsylvania Capital-Star's Editor-in-Chief.
Before joining The Capital-Star, Micek spent six years as Opinion Editor at PennLive/The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., where he helped shape and lead a multiple-award-winning Opinion section for one of Pennsylvania's most-visited news websites.
Prior to that, he spent 13 years covering Pennsylvania government and politics for The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. His career has also included stints covering Congress, Chicago City Hall and more municipal meetings than he could ever count,
Micek contributes regular analysis and commentary to a host of broadcast outlets, including CTV-News in Canada and talkRadio in London, U.K., as well as "Face the State" on CBS-21 in Harrisburg, Pa.; "Pennsylvania Newsmakers" on WGAL-8 in Lancaster, Pa., and the Pennsylvania Cable Network. His weekly column on American politics is syndicated nationwide to more than 800 newspapers by Cagle Syndicate.